No doubt the truth is more complicated; as stated in my original post I was just trying to distill the idea the author of the original article was trying to convey. I hold no judgement over how correct he was in his writing.
Well XP was definitely a Tick, a sequential improvement over 2000, and it was released after Win 2000, which should logically make 2000 the Tock.
I don't think that necessarily makes 2000 a bad release. Just because Vista is a Tock doesn't make Win 2000 a bad release. The problem is that XP merged the NT and Consumer lines under one codebase, so you run in to a grey area where the merge happens.
Personally I ran Win 2000 until games stopped supporting it around 2008-2009, when I switched to XP. I finally switched to Win 7 now that SP 1 is out.
Intel is doing the Tick-Tock cycle for their processor families/flagship products, that sort of sounds like what the author is suggesting here, except for Microsoft's flagship product instead.
Tock: Win 2000 Tick: Win XP Tock: Win Vista Tick: Win 7 Tock: Win 8 Tick: Win 9
My mother is 55 and wears reading glasses while in front of the computer. She sits about 12 feet from the TV on the couch. I bought her a 40", 720p display back in 2009, and from that distance, and her eyesight (about average for someone her age).
She loves it. It's super crisp, and looks really great from that distance. Now, if you're 15 and playing video games sitting on the floor, four feet from it with a complex GUI/HUD, you might be able to take advantage of the extra pixels; but for her and her eyesight (average at best these days), watching CNN/Real Housewives/The Bachelor/NFL Football, it's the perfect TV for her.
That said, there are a couple of movies that come out each year that really make 1080p shine; Transformers, Tron, etc. Broadcast TV rarely sees much benefit from jumping to 1080p, if it's even broadcast at that resolution.
My grandparents (age 82) have a 720p set my uncle bought them recently, and they think it's great for watching Matlock and Gunsmoke (and Fox news). My grandmother actually complains about the 720p display, because it's "smaller" than her old 42" 4:3 CRT, despite only being 420p.
It seems like all the headlines since CmdrTaco left have been really negative, misleading headlines. Do negative headlines really bring in that much more traffic? I stopped reading boing boing because of their terrible headlines, and it looks like Slashdot is headed down that route too.
I used to come here for my daily dose of news and interesting topics, now all the headlines are used to cast doubt on company's futures, failed products and missed deadlines.
I don't mind hearing about "Your Rights Online" and the negative aspects of SOPA, etc, but it's gotten to the point where slashdot is no longer that shining beacon of interesting, exciting NEWs. Why would you spin a minor product improvement (720p->1080p) as a negative headline? What do your readers get out of it? Does it really improve traffic that much? Slashdot goes from being interesting and standing out as a good source of news, to just another "me too" BoingBoing style blog. Please don't do that.
I'm going to hang this off of your post because it's near the top of the thread:
It's fast, easy and FREE to register as a marrow donor. They ask for an optional $100 donation to cover the cost of the test, but it's not required. The registry test involves swabbing the inside of your mouth, at home. It takes about 40 seconds (4 swabs @ 10 seconds each). It's completely painless and there are no needles or doctors involved.
Obviously, registering to become a donor is an important and serious decision to make, but they're short on donors of people not of white/European descent. There's a high likelihood chance you'll never be asked to donate, but there's a 1 in 300,000 chance that you could save a life.
You're forgetting the fact that without a player base, a game dies. Particularly multiplayer, which is all that TF2 is. By introducing it as F2P, Valve probably quadrupled the player base overnight. Not only that, but they introduced them in to a game with hundreds of bugfixes, content updates and major graphical overhauls. All of which had already been paid for. Even while most of those freepers will never buy anything in the store, they provide the much needed player base for those who are spending money in game to play with. They're mainly playing on third party servers, so by opening up the game to anyone, they've increased the game's perceived value at no additional cost to valve or the end user, while allowing the game's popularity to flourish.
Non-iPhone phones are just now starting to get 720p displays in the 4" formfactor, and 4.0 ICS devices support USB and Bluetooth HID prehiprials. Provided you have the eyes for it (or reading glasses, at least) you shouldn't have too much trouble emulating the 1998 desktop experience on a phone
Agreed. Unless the video screen for the back bumper is sitting in the back seat and facing forward, it's not going to be of much use to me. How the hell does one drive backwards while looking forward? That seems completely... backward to me.
Well, say you're a crackin' smart 17 year old Russian programmer, stuck in a small town in the Urals. Now, for some money on the side you've written some parts of a botnet and you're pulling a steady check from that - $200 a month or so. Enough to buy a new offbrand motorcycle and make the internet connection pay for itself. You have no formal education and no way to attend university in Moscow or globally.
You've found a major exploit. You could sell it to your boss, who might give you $5,000 and additional work for another eight months -- OR -- you could sell it to Google for $10,000 and suddenly you have a major bullet point on your resume where you can go work for a legitimate security firm in a city somewhere. You've just gotten double what you could ever hope to make in the black trade, and a major leg up on getting out of the backwater shithole you grew up in. If you work in computers, most anyone would kill to have their name mentioned in the same breath as Google, especially when talking about money and collaboration. It's nice to walk in to an interview and say "yeah, I did some work for Google, did you search my name already?".
$1200 a month is pretty cheap if you really consider how much data that is. If you can make a profit somehow (advertising, subscription rates, etc) of $0.01/song, you should be able to cover your bandwidth costs.
Realistically, bandwidth is going to be the main cost for a business model like this. If you're streaming 10TB+ per month and can't cover the bandwidth based on your existing revenue, you won't be able to scale this up and make much profit, either.
Didn't Tim Cook take over day to day operations of Apple in 2006? Steve Jobs was always the official CEO, but Steve had been grooming Tim Cook for almost half a decade when he finally stepped down. Most of the decisions made in the last six years have been, in part, made by Tim Cook.
I don't think you really know what you're talking about when you say things like "So far, Tim Cook hasn't really done anything significant one way or another and has been kind of 'coasting' on the companies success." when in actuality he has been running the company for 4+ years.
It really doesn't matter how many counterfeit $50s & $100s that the DPRK can print or dump onto the international marketplace. Not one bit, even if the DPRK counterfeited $1 Billion USD instead of only $200 Million USD.
The Manhattan project cost ~$28 billion USD in today's market. How much money do you think it would take to build a nuclear program using the finest French trained nuclear scientists North Korea could produce, combined with fifty years of advances in material and technology science? Does $10 billion sound about right to you? Because that's about the same number of years (10) that we've been really giving NK a hard time about their nuclear program. They say money doesn't grow on trees, but North Korea's been pretty good about growing their own free nuclear program using that money (French universities don't take NK dollars).
the fact that the vehicle was started but no GPS signal was available should be logged
Presumably newer GPS units will be programmed around this, but if your jammer is sending out a signal that says it's the GPS sattelite currently over Cape Town, and it's also reading the signals from the sattelites currently over london, paris and and moscow,it's going to triangulate your position as being somewhere near Egypt or The Congo.
Sort of like if you have a multitouch trackpad and put two fingers on there and the mouse averages between the two, and then you put your thumb on there and the mouse moves again to a new center location.
Britons are required by law to pay a "TV licence" every year, which is about $100, IIRC.
In the states, FCC law overrides homeowner's association ironclad rules about mounting TV antennas on your roof. I suspect for most people the cost reimbursement would be around $200 for a single household, while high rise condominiums might be eligible for $10,000 to refit the entire building. Many buildings in London are three story residences, so you could be looking at $600-1200 to service a building that has three units.
Well, each wiring harness has at least two crimped ends. Ignoring the number of wires, you could have a wire failure, a connector failure, or a crimper failure. That's just for one "part". Now, there's the engine wire harness, the dashboard, instrument cluster, one harness per door, probably another for the stereo system. So you have 8x3=24 failures right there, and those aren't even moving parts.
Maybe there was a molding problem with the power seat adjuster switch, and it cracked after the fourth use when it was parked outside in Minnesota for three weeks under the snow in -20F weather. Or the stereo was stuck in "program input mode" when it left the lot.
There are a hell of a lot of parts, all coming from different manufacturers, many of them outsourced from china, in your car. Sub-assemblies will come loose, crack, rattle, and even sometimes break. There's no way you could realistically pay someone who pays that close attention to detail to open every box of connectors and inspect each one for cracks. There's just no way. You'd go crazy looking over little white MOLEX connectors, 1000 per hour, 8 hours a day. And that's just one guy looking at parts. The likelihood that at least one of them is going to fail in the first 3,000 miles (probably something minor) is nearly 100%, and the statistics reflect that.
"In Soviet-Japanese space, Obayashi elevators YOU!"
Well there's an interesting concept. If you have the only space elevator on earth, you suddenly become everybody's friend, and nobody wants to see you get invaded, should they be denied their access to cheap space freight.
Alternately, different people with different viewpoints (pro linux, pro microsoft, pro apple, pro richard stallman, etc) will mod the most well written posts that support their viewpoints. Given enough moderators, both methods should end up with roughly the same result.
This only works if moderators only up moderate though. Somewhere a couple years ago CmdrTaco pointed out that something like less than 5% of all moderation points are spent down moderating posts, so I think this works overall. Moderation on Slashdot has been pretty consistently high quality for the last decade, so whatever moderators are doing, it seems to work ok!
part of the developer program. Why is that so hard for you to understand?
A couple of replies back you said, "The advantage with iOS is", which made it seem like as if you were promoting iOS over Android. My (obtuse, perhaps) response has been that there are less hoops to jump through to develop on Android since anyone can just install the dev tools and go, no registration needed. The same goes for people testing the program. Apple on the other hand, is introducing hurdles for both parties to overcome to test the software.
If you are not part of a beta program then you just basically stole a copy of the prerelease version and you are then not beta testing anything.
There is no official beta program for the software I am testing because it's free software being written for the users' benefit. No theft is happening. The developer quite literally says "here, try this version and see if it works: http://example.com/program_beta9.apk"
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt the truth is more complicated; as stated in my original post I was just trying to distill the idea the author of the original article was trying to convey. I hold no judgement over how correct he was in his writing.
Well XP was definitely a Tick, a sequential improvement over 2000, and it was released after Win 2000, which should logically make 2000 the Tock.
I don't think that necessarily makes 2000 a bad release. Just because Vista is a Tock doesn't make Win 2000 a bad release. The problem is that XP merged the NT and Consumer lines under one codebase, so you run in to a grey area where the merge happens.
Personally I ran Win 2000 until games stopped supporting it around 2008-2009, when I switched to XP. I finally switched to Win 7 now that SP 1 is out.
Intel is doing the Tick-Tock cycle for their processor families/flagship products, that sort of sounds like what the author is suggesting here, except for Microsoft's flagship product instead.
Tock: Win 2000
Tick: Win XP
Tock: Win Vista
Tick: Win 7
Tock: Win 8
Tick: Win 9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock
My mother is 55 and wears reading glasses while in front of the computer. She sits about 12 feet from the TV on the couch. I bought her a 40", 720p display back in 2009, and from that distance, and her eyesight (about average for someone her age).
She loves it. It's super crisp, and looks really great from that distance. Now, if you're 15 and playing video games sitting on the floor, four feet from it with a complex GUI/HUD, you might be able to take advantage of the extra pixels; but for her and her eyesight (average at best these days), watching CNN/Real Housewives/The Bachelor/NFL Football, it's the perfect TV for her.
That said, there are a couple of movies that come out each year that really make 1080p shine; Transformers, Tron, etc. Broadcast TV rarely sees much benefit from jumping to 1080p, if it's even broadcast at that resolution.
My grandparents (age 82) have a 720p set my uncle bought them recently, and they think it's great for watching Matlock and Gunsmoke (and Fox news). My grandmother actually complains about the 720p display, because it's "smaller" than her old 42" 4:3 CRT, despite only being 420p.
It seems like all the headlines since CmdrTaco left have been really negative, misleading headlines. Do negative headlines really bring in that much more traffic? I stopped reading boing boing because of their terrible headlines, and it looks like Slashdot is headed down that route too.
I used to come here for my daily dose of news and interesting topics, now all the headlines are used to cast doubt on company's futures, failed products and missed deadlines.
I don't mind hearing about "Your Rights Online" and the negative aspects of SOPA, etc, but it's gotten to the point where slashdot is no longer that shining beacon of interesting, exciting NEWs. Why would you spin a minor product improvement (720p->1080p) as a negative headline? What do your readers get out of it? Does it really improve traffic that much? Slashdot goes from being interesting and standing out as a good source of news, to just another "me too" BoingBoing style blog. Please don't do that.
I'm going to hang this off of your post because it's near the top of the thread:
It's fast, easy and FREE to register as a marrow donor. They ask for an optional $100 donation to cover the cost of the test, but it's not required. The registry test involves swabbing the inside of your mouth, at home. It takes about 40 seconds (4 swabs @ 10 seconds each). It's completely painless and there are no needles or doctors involved.
Join the Marrow Registry - http://marrow.org/Join/Join_the_Registry.aspx
Obviously, registering to become a donor is an important and serious decision to make, but they're short on donors of people not of white/European descent. There's a high likelihood chance you'll never be asked to donate, but there's a 1 in 300,000 chance that you could save a life.
You're forgetting the fact that without a player base, a game dies. Particularly multiplayer, which is all that TF2 is. By introducing it as F2P, Valve probably quadrupled the player base overnight. Not only that, but they introduced them in to a game with hundreds of bugfixes, content updates and major graphical overhauls. All of which had already been paid for. Even while most of those freepers will never buy anything in the store, they provide the much needed player base for those who are spending money in game to play with. They're mainly playing on third party servers, so by opening up the game to anyone, they've increased the game's perceived value at no additional cost to valve or the end user, while allowing the game's popularity to flourish.
Non-iPhone phones are just now starting to get 720p displays in the 4" formfactor, and 4.0 ICS devices support USB and Bluetooth HID prehiprials. Provided you have the eyes for it (or reading glasses, at least) you shouldn't have too much trouble emulating the 1998 desktop experience on a phone
Agreed. Unless the video screen for the back bumper is sitting in the back seat and facing forward, it's not going to be of much use to me. How the hell does one drive backwards while looking forward? That seems completely... backward to me.
Well, say you're a crackin' smart 17 year old Russian programmer, stuck in a small town in the Urals. Now, for some money on the side you've written some parts of a botnet and you're pulling a steady check from that - $200 a month or so. Enough to buy a new offbrand motorcycle and make the internet connection pay for itself. You have no formal education and no way to attend university in Moscow or globally.
You've found a major exploit. You could sell it to your boss, who might give you $5,000 and additional work for another eight months -- OR -- you could sell it to Google for $10,000 and suddenly you have a major bullet point on your resume where you can go work for a legitimate security firm in a city somewhere. You've just gotten double what you could ever hope to make in the black trade, and a major leg up on getting out of the backwater shithole you grew up in. If you work in computers, most anyone would kill to have their name mentioned in the same breath as Google, especially when talking about money and collaboration. It's nice to walk in to an interview and say "yeah, I did some work for Google, did you search my name already?".
$1200 a month is pretty cheap if you really consider how much data that is. If you can make a profit somehow (advertising, subscription rates, etc) of $0.01/song, you should be able to cover your bandwidth costs.
Realistically, bandwidth is going to be the main cost for a business model like this. If you're streaming 10TB+ per month and can't cover the bandwidth based on your existing revenue, you won't be able to scale this up and make much profit, either.
Didn't Tim Cook take over day to day operations of Apple in 2006? Steve Jobs was always the official CEO, but Steve had been grooming Tim Cook for almost half a decade when he finally stepped down. Most of the decisions made in the last six years have been, in part, made by Tim Cook.
I don't think you really know what you're talking about when you say things like "So far, Tim Cook hasn't really done anything significant one way or another and has been kind of 'coasting' on the companies success." when in actuality he has been running the company for 4+ years.
What about houses, cars and capital goods that only depreciate (approx 33% of our economy)?
The Manhattan project cost ~$28 billion USD in today's market. How much money do you think it would take to build a nuclear program using the finest French trained nuclear scientists North Korea could produce, combined with fifty years of advances in material and technology science? Does $10 billion sound about right to you? Because that's about the same number of years (10) that we've been really giving NK a hard time about their nuclear program. They say money doesn't grow on trees, but North Korea's been pretty good about growing their own free nuclear program using that money (French universities don't take NK dollars).
Presumably newer GPS units will be programmed around this, but if your jammer is sending out a signal that says it's the GPS sattelite currently over Cape Town, and it's also reading the signals from the sattelites currently over london, paris and and moscow,it's going to triangulate your position as being somewhere near Egypt or The Congo.
Sort of like if you have a multitouch trackpad and put two fingers on there and the mouse averages between the two, and then you put your thumb on there and the mouse moves again to a new center location.
Britons are required by law to pay a "TV licence" every year, which is about $100, IIRC.
In the states, FCC law overrides homeowner's association ironclad rules about mounting TV antennas on your roof. I suspect for most people the cost reimbursement would be around $200 for a single household, while high rise condominiums might be eligible for $10,000 to refit the entire building. Many buildings in London are three story residences, so you could be looking at $600-1200 to service a building that has three units.
Clearly you've never had to deal with a car insurance claim adjuster!
Well, each wiring harness has at least two crimped ends. Ignoring the number of wires, you could have a wire failure, a connector failure, or a crimper failure. That's just for one "part". Now, there's the engine wire harness, the dashboard, instrument cluster, one harness per door, probably another for the stereo system. So you have 8x3=24 failures right there, and those aren't even moving parts.
Maybe there was a molding problem with the power seat adjuster switch, and it cracked after the fourth use when it was parked outside in Minnesota for three weeks under the snow in -20F weather. Or the stereo was stuck in "program input mode" when it left the lot.
There are a hell of a lot of parts, all coming from different manufacturers, many of them outsourced from china, in your car. Sub-assemblies will come loose, crack, rattle, and even sometimes break. There's no way you could realistically pay someone who pays that close attention to detail to open every box of connectors and inspect each one for cracks. There's just no way. You'd go crazy looking over little white MOLEX connectors, 1000 per hour, 8 hours a day. And that's just one guy looking at parts. The likelihood that at least one of them is going to fail in the first 3,000 miles (probably something minor) is nearly 100%, and the statistics reflect that.
Well there's an interesting concept. If you have the only space elevator on earth, you suddenly become everybody's friend, and nobody wants to see you get invaded, should they be denied their access to cheap space freight.
It's not harmful, it's just that mod points are limited. Which would you rather do, promote 5 good posts, or bury one bad one?
Washington Post broke the story late last year:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/georgetown-students-shed-light-on-chinas-tunnel-system-for-nuclear-weapons/2011/11/16/gIQA6AmKAO_story.html
Though they can only predict the size/length, not the actual mapped location(s).
Alternately, different people with different viewpoints (pro linux, pro microsoft, pro apple, pro richard stallman, etc) will mod the most well written posts that support their viewpoints. Given enough moderators, both methods should end up with roughly the same result.
This only works if moderators only up moderate though. Somewhere a couple years ago CmdrTaco pointed out that something like less than 5% of all moderation points are spent down moderating posts, so I think this works overall. Moderation on Slashdot has been pretty consistently high quality for the last decade, so whatever moderators are doing, it seems to work ok!
To be fair, the Chinese are doing what he suggested -- albeit in secret underground train tunnels that span the length of the country.
It seems like it would be cheaper to simply lie about how many you have.
A couple of replies back you said, "The advantage with iOS is", which made it seem like as if you were promoting iOS over Android. My (obtuse, perhaps) response has been that there are less hoops to jump through to develop on Android since anyone can just install the dev tools and go, no registration needed. The same goes for people testing the program. Apple on the other hand, is introducing hurdles for both parties to overcome to test the software.
There is no official beta program for the software I am testing because it's free software being written for the users' benefit. No theft is happening. The developer quite literally says "here, try this version and see if it works: http://example.com/program_beta9.apk"